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Contacting Juerd

Linux and Open Source Software

Linux is a computer operating system. The best known
operating system is Microsoft Windows. It appears that many people are not
aware of the existence of any non-Windows operating systems. They're certainly
missing out, because Windows is known to be fragile and insecure, whereas Linux
and some other operating systems are solid and have a good security track
record.

Open Source Software means that everyone can review the programming code of a
program. This means that anyone can help find security bugs and illogic
constructs. It also means that when a security fix is known, a system
administrator can apply it without having to wait for a vendor to release a new
version.

Most OSS isn't just open, it's also free. Usually free in both senses: free as
in free beer, and free as in free speech.

My favourite Linux distributions

I like Debian, which makes system administration
easy while providing fairly recent software packages. Installing software
in Debian usually is a single command, as is upgrading an entire system
including most of the installed software. I use Debian on servers.

Ubuntu is a nice Debian derivative that I run on my
laptops. It's free, complete, and incredibly easy to install and maintain. It
manages to get a lot of things working out of the box. I'm not used to
installing device drivers anymore :).

My favourite Linux software

Now that you know what Linux and OSS, I'll list my favourite Linux/OSS software:

bash: often the default shell and quite usable.

vim: a great text
editor (you really need a good text editor if you use Linux. A simple
program like Microsoft Notepad is not good enough if you deal with a
huge amount of text files.)

Firefox: although KDE has a very fast
browser, the somewhat slower Firefox is better compatible with web sites.

Inkscape: a great vector illustration program, comparable to Adobe Illustrator, but free and compliant with the open SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard.

Gimp: an extremely powerful graphics program, but it is a bit hard
to use. The 2.0 prerelease is much easier to use than Gimp used to be.

mutt: certainly the best e-mail client available for text
terminals. Much faster than Pine, and highly customisable.

Irssi: the IRC client of my choice. I wrote some extensions, and
some of my ideas went into the core program that is used by many people
worldwide. This is why I like Open Source.

Perl: a somewhat cryptic, but brilliant programming language.
Almost all of my programming is done in this language, and so is
this site.

For connecting to Linux servers with ssh using a Windows computer, just
use PuTTY. It emulates a real Linux terminal quite well.